Fault-tolerant, real-time communication in FDDI-based networks

The first high-speed network to meet the Safenet standard's bandwidth requirements, the Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) needs help to meet Safenet's fault tolerance requirement. Researchers have proposed a number of FDDI-based network architecture designs for improving fault tolerance. An architecture called FBRN (FDDI-Based Reconfigurable Network) provides enhanced fault tolerance by using (a) multiple FDDI networks to connect hosts, and (b) efficient fault detection and network configuration algorithms. To provide fault-tolerant real-time communication with the FBRN architecture, users must manage network resources properly. We sought to accomplish this by using a fault-tolerant, real-time management mechanism with online and offline components. We focused on achieving high performance by designing efficient and effective online and offline management algorithms to work around multiple faults